About

Row

Abstract

This project is a study of the U.S. housing market in 2017, mainly focusing on the index: ‘list price (or asking price) for homes listed on Zillow per square foot’ and ‘Rental price per square foot of homes listed for rent’. Aims to present the housing market from multiple dimensions and visualize the results in a reader-friendly way.

On the page ‘Exploratory’, the project shows an overview of the data of these two indicators. At the same time, it also compared the difference in selling price and rent between different types of houses, as well as the difference between the actual price and the estimated house value.

On the page trends’, the project explores the data on time level, presenting the changes in list price and rental price from the beginning of 2016 to the end of 2017 and forecasting them. Through the text analysis of the monthly report (published by Zillow), the project found the most popular topic in the housing market in 2017 and conducted further research.

As for the page geographical Trends’, this is a geographical exploration of list price and rental price.

Row

Dataset

All the data are downloaded from or scraped from the:

  1. Zillow Website
    • Zillow’s Economic Research Team collects, cleans and publishes housing and economic data from a variety of public and proprietary sources.
    • The dataset contains 82 columns. The variables include: Housing price, housing type, regional data, timestampe, etc.
  2. Census Bureau Website
    • The Census Bureau is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce and the mission is to serve as the nation’s leading provider of quality data about its people and economy.
    • The dataset is about migration flows between states.

Technology

This project mainly used R language, and displayed the results in the form of Dashboard. Most charts are interactive plots, readers can click the legend and graph, selecting the elements that they want to see more detailed.

The package applied:

  • Data cleaning package
    • tidyr
    • dplyr
    • data.table
    • tm
    • tibble
  • Visualization package:
    • ggplot2
    • hrbrthemes
    • circlize
    • ggpubr
    • wordcloud2
    • viridis
  • Flexdashboard package:
    • flexdashboard
    • plotly

The model applied:

  • Sarima Time Series Prediction Model

Exploratory

Row

Number of Sold house

4,645,631

Avg House Price Per Sqft

157.6

Avg Rental Price Per Sqft

1.1

Pct of Increasing Homes Price

Pct of Sell For Gain

Row

Distribution of All Types House Price and Rental Price (Pre Sqft)

House Price and Rental Price By Various Types (Pre Sqft)

Row

Overview

In 2017, more than four million houses were sold in the United States, and 94% of sellers profited from these transactions. The average annual listing house price in 2017 was $157.6 per square foot, and the average annual rent was $1.1 per square foot. For both sold and rental houses, distribution shapes of actual and estimated prices are very similar concentrate on relatively low price. And real price distribution shows more left-skewed, indicating that the actual prices are higher than their estimated prices And people who rent a house are less likely to be interested in the high-value house. (see the figure on the top left for more details). Moreover, different house types have different selling prices and rents. Compared with other house types, 1bedroom and 3bedroom houses are more expensive.(see the figure on the bottom left for more details)